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Sunday, October 23, 2011

Sweet Transitional Sourdough

My Most Aesthetic Bread Yet

I made some bread today for our Downton Abbey picnic. It was absolutely fantastic. I realized that by refreshing the wild yeast a few hours before using putting it into the starter in the bread recipe, it gives the bread that amazing sweet flavor with no sweeteners of any kind. It was far too tempting-- we ate the whole first loaf between the three of us tonight.

567g Unbleached Bread Flour (I used a combination of bread flour
and-- when I ran out of that-- a high-protein all-purpose flour-- King
Arthur's)

18g Salt

Directions
Starter (Day 1)

Mix the ingredients for the starter together about 8 hours befor you plan to use it.

Make sure you mix it with a for or something that will help incorporate a little air.

Cover the bowl or jar and leave it to mature overnight at room
temperature. Otherwise, the starter can rest in the refrigerator for up
to three days.

Final Dough (Day 2)

The starter, by now, should be all bubbly and smell slightly sweet.

Dissolve the starter in the water.

Then add the unbleached flour and the salt and mix into tacky ball. Let the dough rest for five minutes.

The knead the dough by hand for 3 minutes. Try to incorporate air.

Then do the first Peter Reinhart stretch-and-fold. Do four total with 10 minutes in between each.

Depending on how warm your kitchen is, let the dough rest out
(covered) for 1.5-2 hours before placing in the refrigerator. It was
about 75 degrees in my kitchen and I let the dough sit out for 2 hours.
Place it in the refrigerator overnight.

Shaping and Baking (Day 3)

Take the bread out of the refrigerator 5-6 hours before baking. Let
it rest on at room temperature for 2-3 hours, depending upon the room
temperature. The bread was still very cold at 2 hours, so I waited the
extra hour.

Then turn the dough onto a lightly floured surface and divide it. It can make two 1.5lb loaves or three 1lb loaves. Preshape.

Let the dough rest for 20-30 minutes, and then do the final shaping.
Cover the loaves and let them rise for 2.5-4 hours. My loaves needed
three hours. The first loaf we baked after two hours and I think that it
could have used a little extra rising time, while the second one we
baked at three hours and it turned out better.

20 minutes before baking, heat up the your oven with your stone-and-broth-pot or dutch oven to 500 degrees F.

Turn your dough onto a floured peel and score it right before you
put it into the oven. Turn the oven down to 450 degrees F (425
convection).

Let the dough bake under steam for 30-35 minutes, making sure that the edges of your scoring marks have turned golden.

Then bake it for 20-25 minutes without steam, ensuring that it has
an internal temperature of 212 degrees. It should be fairly light in
weight and dark brown in color.

Wait at least 30 minutes before slicing.

It was absolutely fantastic. One or two notes:

First, I've been using parchment on the dough as I slide it into the oven. It take the parchment paper off the bottom when I take the bread out from under steam. The reason that I've been doing this is twofold. First, sometimes my breads stick to the peel a little and stretch as I slide them into the oven. This does not happen with the parchment paper. Second, it means there is less flour that burns in the oven that I have to clean up later.

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